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Faculty Fellow

Julie Orlemanski

Associate Professor of English University of Chicago

Biography

Julie Orlemanski

Photo by Erielle Bakkum

Julie Orlemanski teaches and writes about texts from the late Middle Ages and theoretical and methodological questions in present-day literary studies. What distinguishes medieval thought from our own, and what links it, are of persistent fascination to her. Accordingly, she has longstanding interests in hermeneutics and historicism. Other ongoing research interests include the Song of Songs, disability studies and the history of the body, narratology, and the secularization thesis or so-called disenchantment of the world. Orlemanski's monograph, Symptomatic Subjects: Bodies, Medicine, and Causation in the Literature of Late Medieval England (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), considers embodiment in the historical period just prior to medicine’s modernity—before Renaissance anatomy, before the centralized regulation of medical professions, before empiricism and the rationalist division of mental from physical substance.

To learn more about Orlemanski's research and publications, please visit her profile page at the Department of English.

julieorlemanski@uchicago.edu

Topics

Featured Project

The Case of the Human: Co-Producing Plural Knowledge on the Body, the Social, and the Subject

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2024 – 2025
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Projects

The Case of the Human II: Co-Producing Plural Knowledge on the Body, the Social, and the Subject

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The Case of the Human II: Co-Producing Plural Knowledge on the Body, the Social, and the Subject

Medical and humanistic understandings of health and well-being have intersected in recent decades, but the category of “the human” continues to be defined and applied in different ways. This project will identify a more holistic understanding of “the human” that is neither primarily medical nor...
Between the humanities and medicine there exist numerous definitions of the human, from differing perspectives and with different political implications. In recent decades, these disparate fields have built a tentative and growing dialogue. However, truly multidisciplinary research between the two ...

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CEDAR Phase Two: Critical Editions for Digital Analysis and Research

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CEDAR Phase Two: Critical Editions for Digital Analysis and Research

This project extends a multi-year digital humanities initiative that is producing critical editions of canonical texts. In the first phase, the research team built a database that includes the Gilgamesh Epic, the Hebrew Bible, and Shakespeare’s plays. In this phase they will add the Egyptian Book...
CEDAR is a multi-project digital humanities initiative involving literary corpora that have complex histories of composition, revision, and dissemination. The first phase of the project focused on three corpora written in different historical periods using very different languages and scripts. The ...

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